Lipstick Jungle

  She turned away from the window and walked back and forth across the Oriental rug. It was just business, she reminded herself. Mike Harness knew how Splatch-Verner worked. He had to know that someday Victor might chop off his head. And it wasn’t like Mike hadn’t done his share of head-chopping . . .

  But you always thought it would happen to other people. You never thought it would happen to you.

  Maybe that was the difference between her and the other, mostly male executives at Splatch-Verner, she thought. She knew it could happen to her. And after she took Mike’s job, depending on the circumstances, she might be able to hold on to it for two years, maybe five, and if she was really lucky, possibly ten. But eventually she would get the ax too.

  Unless she got Victor Matrick’s job.

  She looked down at the dark street below and smiled. Nico O’Neilly, CEO of Splatch-Verner, she thought. It was a definite possibility.

  Chapter 6

  WENDY AWOKE WITH A JOLT.

  She was having the same dream. She was somewhere (anywhere) and she was weak and sick. She could barely walk. Someone was telling her that she had to get into the elevator. She couldn’t make it. She fell to the floor in a dramatic heap. She couldn’t get up. Her life force was ebbing away. It was out of her control. Now that she knew she was dying, she didn’t care. It was so peaceful lying there, knowing that she had no choice but to give up . . .

  She opened her eyes. Goddammit. The room was still dark. She knew it was four a.m., but she was determined not to look at the clock. In a couple of hours it would be another day. Day forty-three, to be exact. It was now forty-three days and five hours since Shane had destroyed their perfect little family.

  A sinister greasy black thread of shame traveled up her torso and seemed to wrap itself around her neck. She squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth. She’d known plenty of people who’d gotten divorced, but no one ever told you what it was really like. You heard about deception and suddenly not knowing who your partner was. You heard about anger and insane behavior. But no one talked about the shame. Or the guilt. Or the overwhelming sense of failure that made you wonder if there was any point to life at all.

  The shame was like a knife. She’d felt the edge of the shame-knife against her skin, a few times in her ten-year marriage, when she and Shane had been so angry with each other, the thought of divorce had crossed her mind. But the pain and sharpness of the shame had always been enough to make her turn back. To make her think that no matter how awful her marriage was at that moment, ending it would be worse.

  And the next day or two or three or seven, when she and Shane were back on track (usually after one of their special sex sessions), she would experience a soaring appreciation for Shane and their marriage. It wasn’t conventional, but who cared? It worked. She knew some women would have been insane over the reality of paying for everything, but she enjoyed it. She loved making money, lots of money; and she loved that she was a success in the crazy, cutthroat world of entertainment that was always, literally, entertaining (although often frustrating and frightening, but she always reminded herself that she’d rather be frightened than bored). She always knew she could handle it because she had balance. She had her family as an oasis.

  She rolled over onto her side and curled her legs under her. She would not cry. But it was all lost, and she couldn’t understand why. She’d always thought that she and Shane and the kids had a great time together. And for some reason, she suddenly thought about Tyler’s fish, the Blue Drake. She’d bought the Chinese fighting fish for him at the beginning of last summer, and he insisted on bringing the Blue Drake with them to Dark Harbor, Maine, where they were spending two weeks because that’s where all the Hollywood people were going. The Blue Drake had been accorded status as a family member, and most of the drive to Maine had consisted of keeping the damn fish alive, especially after Shane accidentally shocked it by putting it in ice water in a hotel sink. The survival of the Blue Drake became a running theme for the vacation, the kind of story Wendy imagined they would laugh about twenty years later when the kids were grown and had come home for the holidays. Remorse coursed through her body like poison. That would never happen now. Without Shane, what would the family’s future look like? What would happen to the stories?

  She wasn’t going to get any more sleep. Every day was like this now—it jangled with the irritations of the unknown. She was frightened. She had, she realized, spent a good portion of her life being secretly afraid. Afraid of being alone, of not having a man. Of appearing not good enough to have a man. Was that one of the reasons why she worked so hard to be successful? So she could buy a man? If she could buy one man, she thought bitterly, chances were she could buy another.

  She would get up and work. A long time ago, she figured out that the only way to ease the fear was to work harder. The hour was now five a.m. A weary, black hour, she decided, but she willed herself to get out of bed and brush her teeth. She went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. She took her mug into the office and sat down at the cheap metal desk. The desk had been Shane’s in college, and he’d refused to part with it for sentimental reasons. She’d never pushed him to get rid of it. She’d always allowed Shane his idiosyncrasies out of respect. She would have hated having a husband who told her what to do, and into their second year of marriage it had dawned on her that the key to making a marriage work might be as simple as treating someone the way you wanted to be treated.

  But apparently that wasn’t enough.

  She picked up a screenplay from the top of a pile of scripts: It struck her that a stack of screenplays had been an ever-present factor in her life for over twenty years. They were messengered home for reading on the weekends, FedExed to exotic locations, schlepped in bags on cars and trains and buses. And she read them all. So far, in her lifetime, she must have read close to five thousand scripts. And there was no end in sight. She suddenly had a depressing vision of her future. It would be almost exactly the same as it was now, except that she would be older and more tired and alone. She had days now when she fantasized about going to bed for a week.

  She opened the screenplay, read five pages, and put it down, irritated by a scene in which a mother chides her twenty-five-year-old daughter for not being married yet. She looked at the front cover, knowing that the screenplay had to be written by a man, and probably a young one—only men still believed that what mothers really wanted for their daughters was a good marriage. But the screenplay was written by a woman: Shasta something. What kind of a name was Shasta? she thought, becoming more annoyed. More importantly, what kind of woman was Shasta? Didn’t she know that the cliché of mothers despairing over their unmarried daughters was passé?

  She wrote “No” across the paper cover and pushed it aside.

  She picked up the next screenplay on the pile and inched her glasses down her nose so she could see better. Lately she’d noticed that the words on the page stubbornly refused to come into focus. But she couldn’t focus her mind either. She thought about Shasta’s mother. Of course, there were still women like that, women who believed that the only way a woman could truly define herself was through a husband and children. She had always felt deeply at odds with that particular type of woman—the type who thought it was desirable to be a housewife, to be dependent on a man. Until recently, her feelings about those “other” women were as fiercely held as political and religious beliefs in which there can be no moral compromise. But now she wasn’t so sure.

  The catalyst for her reassessment was a conversation she’d had with her mother two days before. She called her mother to tell her that she and Shane were splitting up, confident of her mother’s support. For years, Wendy had believed that her mother was her biggest champion, and she’d told herself that she was successful because of her mother’s influence. She was convinced that during her childhood and her teenage years, her mother had given her the unspoken message that she mustn’t end up like her—a housewife—and it was a mistake to
be dependent on a man, especially one like her father. Wendy’s mother had four children and never worked, and there were days when Wendy was a young teenager that her mother hadn’t been able to get out of bed. Her mother was depressed, of course, but they didn’t have an easy diagnosis back then, and staying in bed all day was something that happened to suburban moms. She could have resented her mother for it—for the embarrassing hours when she’d be waiting after school for her mother to pick her up and she never showed—but Wendy loved her mother with the kind of passion that is blind to flaws. Her mother was probably a borderline personality, a hysteric, but all Wendy remembered was that her mother was beautiful and charming, the most glamorous woman in the neighborhood when she wanted to be, and she had been instrumental in encouraging Wendy to become a success.

  Or that was what Wendy had believed, anyway, right up until she had told her mother about Shane.

  “Oh Wendy,” her mother sighed. “I suppose it was only a matter of time.”

  “A matter of time?” Wendy asked, shocked. She’d been expecting sympathy from her mother, not chastisement.

  “I knew this would happen eventually. This kind of marriage never works out. It’s not natural.”

  Wendy was dumbstruck. “I thought you and Dad loved Shane.”

  Her mother sighed. “We liked him as a person. Not as a husband. We never thought the marriage would work.”

  Wendy gasped. “It worked for twelve years,” she said.

  “Only because Shane is so lazy. Your father and I always thought that someday Shane would get fed up and leave. I’ve been wanting to warn you for years, but I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “You’re upsetting me now,” Wendy said. “I’m just trying to figure out why.”

  “I only wish you’d married a successful man and didn’t have to work so much,” her mother said. “Then this would never have happened.”

  Wendy sat with her mouth open. “I thought you wanted me to be successful.” Her eyes prickled. Her own mother was abandoning her?

  “Of course I wanted you to be successful,” her mother said. “But you don’t have to take over the world to be successful. I wanted you to be happy. I always thought you could have been very happy married to a lawyer or banker. You could have had your children and still worked if you’d wanted to.”

  Wendy was so stunned, she had to grab on to the side of her desk for support. This was the future her mother had envisioned for her? “You wanted me to work at some measly job?” she asked, her voice rising in anger.

  “It wouldn’t have to have been measly,” her mother said patiently. “But your husband could have been the provider.” She paused. “I know you don’t believe it, honey, but marriages only work when the man makes more money. Men need that kind of incentive to stay in a marriage. It makes them feel good about themselves.”

  “And what about me?” Wendy asked in disbelief, her voice rising to a squeak. “Don’t I have a right to feel good about myself?”

  Her mother sighed. “Don’t take everything I say the wrong way,” she said, and Wendy realized that that was exactly what she had been doing, for years. “Women have lots of ways to feel good about themselves,” her mother continued. “They have their children and their homes. Men only have one thing—their jobs. And if a woman takes that away, you can’t really expect the man to hang around.”

  Was this really her mother speaking? Wendy wondered in horror. Her mother couldn’t possibly believe what she was saying. But she suddenly realized that in the last twenty years, she and her mother had never had a real discussion about sex or relationships. Her mother had never voiced her opinions on men and women and the roles they should play, so Wendy had naturally assumed that she and her mother saw eye-to-eye. Was it possible that everything she’d assumed about all of her relationships was wrong?

  “Why are you being so mean, Mother?” she asked.

  “It’s just that I see all these nice couples in town,” her mother said. “Lots of couples your age, with children. The men are professionals. And the women work. But they also have time to take their kids to sports . . .”

  “If you’re saying my children are deprived . . . ” Wendy began.

  “Oh, I know they have everything, Wendy,” her mother snapped. “Too much. But that isn’t the point. These couples seem happy.”

  “But who are they? What do they do? Are they the president of a major motion picture company?”

  “That isn’t really important,” her mother said primly.

  “It is important,” Wendy snapped. “It’s the only thing that’s important. It makes all the difference—”

  “It doesn’t mean you can’t have a normal relationship,” her mother said.

  “I had a normal relationship.”

  “With a man who provides,” her mother said. “Men have egos. This business about the woman being in control . . . of everything . . . it doesn’t really work in a marriage.”

  Wendy paused. “How many men are out there who are more successful than I am?” she asked, and for some bizarre reason, immediately thought of Selden Rose.

  “Maybe you don’t need to be so successful.”

  This was so completely unfathomable that Wendy didn’t trust herself to respond. She hung up.

  She hated fighting with her mother. It hurt too much. It actually pained her. And all these years, she’d been working her ass off not just to provide for Shane and her children, but to make sure she could take care of her mother in her old age.

  Wendy picked up her coffee cup and walked to the window. She hadn’t spoken to her mother since she’d hung up on her, and this was yet another burdensome boulder of pain. Why was she losing everyone who was close to her? Why was she being punished?

  She peered out into the gray gloom of dawn. She wanted to dismiss everything her mother had said, but instead she found herself thinking about certain uncomfortable and inevitable truths. If she’d been able to find a guy who would have supported her and “provided” for her (ugh, she hated that word, “provided”), would she have made that choice? She didn’t know the answer, because the possibility had never seemed like an option—a painful truth she now realized her mother would never comprehend.

  Everyone always said that women had choices, but it wasn’t exactly true. Women didn’t really have the grab bag of options everyone said they did—an itchy reality Wendy began to understand in college. By her sophomore year, she had decided that there were basically two types of women in the world: women for whom men went crazy, fell in love with, and eventually would marry and pay for; and women who, for whatever reason, didn’t inspire much ardor in men—at least not the kind of grand passions that would cause a man to “provide.” She’d understood immediately that she fell into the latter category, and if she were to get a commitment from a man, she’d need to have something extra to offer.

  Her plan had always been to distract men from her lack of beauty with her hardworking efficiency, her independence, her ability to take care of herself—and, in turn, them.

  And it worked. Along with all those hours spent being an assistant, taking abuse, working till midnight, schlepping screenplays and, eventually, moving up the entertainment ladder, came the spoils of success. Money and apartments and decent clothing and cars, all proudly paid for by her alone. She told herself she didn’t “need” a man, didn’t “need” to play games.

  But that too was a lie.

  She had played games. She had worked on Shane from the beginning, despite her suspicions that he didn’t inherently want to be with her. She’d convinced herself that she would be able to wear him down and make him see her value. When he understood how much she could do for him, he would have to love her. In the beginning, when she was convincing him to be with her, she had looked the other way when she suspected he had dalliances with other women. She never criticized him; always told him he was a genius (when, really, he should have been telling her that she was the genius). She was motherly. And more. She
was always good for a hot meal and hot pussy. And eventually, he had given in. She told him she loved him after the first two months. It took him two years to say the words.

  She had bought him, and as the purchaser, she’d thought she was safe.

  Her mother was right. What an arrogant fool she’d been.

  She sat stiffly, this dreadful reality permeating her being like poison.

  She’d always insisted that she and Shane had a new, modern type of marriage—the marriage of the future! But in reality, it was nothing more than a reversal of a traditional marriage—and hadn’t there been times when she’d jokingly referred to Shane as the “perfect movie executive wife”?

  The line always elicited titters of amusement from her fellow male executives and nods of appreciation from her female friends. She had always been careful never to say it in front of Shane, but he must have sensed these subtle attacks to his male ego. And he wouldn’t have liked it.

  She put her head in her hands. How had their relationship turned into such a mess? It wasn’t like she hadn’t wanted Shane to work. She’d supported him in everything he’d tried to do. The problem was that he just wasn’t very good at anything. He had no staying power and unrealistic expectations, and couldn’t take criticism. He was arrogant. People gave him a chance (usually as a favor to her), and after he didn’t deliver on time and argued and grandstanded, they simply refused to work with him again. She’d wanted to explain to him that he wasn’t talented enough to pull those kinds of histrionics, but how could you say that to someone, especially someone you were married to?

  And if they’d been dependent on his income? She shook her head. They would have starved. They certainly wouldn’t have had all this . . .

  She looked around the pathetic, cluttered office with wry distaste. The rest of the apartment was just like this—little more than raw space with thin plasterboard walls slapped up to create a semblance of rooms. As part of her deal with Parador, the studio (or, rather, Splatch-Verner) was supposed to pay fifty percent of the cost of a renovation up to half a million dollars; on top of that, they were obligated to put in a screening room. Two years ago, she had put Shane in charge of the renovation (thinking it would be good for him, giving him something constructive and manly and ego-boosting to do), but Shane had dropped the ball. He’d immediately started fighting with each of the three contractors he’d hired, so they’d all quit within two weeks; then he said he could do a better job himself. Then he did nothing.